THE UNCANNY VALLEY
By M. Mori. The Monster Theory Reader, 2020
223 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Editor's note: More than 40 years ago, Masahiro Mori, then a robotics professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, wrote an essay on how he envisioned people's reactions to robots that looked and acted almost human. In particular, he hypothesized that a person's response to a humanlike robot would abruptly shift from empathy to revulsion as it approached, but failed to attain, a lifelike appearance. This descent into eeriness is known as the uncanny valley. The essay appeared in an obscure Japanese journal called Energy in 1970, and in subsequent years it received almost no attention. More recently, however, the concept of the uncanny valley has rapidly attracted interest in robotics and other scientific circles as well as in popular culture. Some researchers have explored its implications for human-robot interaction and computer-graphics animation, while others have investigated its biological and social roots. Now interest in the uncanny valley should only intensify, as technology evolves and researchers build robots that look increasingly human. Though copies of Mori's essay have circulated among researchers, a complete version hasn't been widely available. This is the first publication of an English translation that has been authorized and reviewed by Mori. [Read an exclusive interview with him.]
Subfields: Education, Political Science and International Relations, Reproductive Medicine
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/305b8306b23f42870fa3191af85c547e4a922c44
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Citations in the corpus
- Service robot implementation: a theoretical framework and research agenda (2019, background): “However, understanding the link between human-likeness and favorability also might depend on the uncanny valley e ff ect (Mori, 1970), which predicts that people ’ s a ffi nity toward robots increases with greater human-likeness, so robots that look somewhat like humans evoke greater a ffi nity, but…”
- Eliza in the uncanny valley: anthropomorphizing consumer robots increases their perceived warmth but decreases liking (2019, background): “…more human-like, individuals first show positive affinity toward them; however, when robots become too human-like, people experience a feeling of eeriness or uncanniness (Mori 1970; Wang et al.2015 ), especially when people ascribe to them experience rather than agency (Gray and Wegner 2012).”
- How artificial intelligence will change the future of marketing (2019, background): “As robots appear more humanlike, they become more unnerving, in line with the uncanny valley hypothesis (UVH; Mori 1970).”
- Few-Shot Adversarial Learning of Realistic Neural Talking Head Models (2019, background): “The second complicating factor is the acuteness of the human visual system towards even minor mistakes in the appearance modeling of human heads (the so-called uncanny valley effect [24]).”
- Marketing robot services in hospitality and tourism: the role of anthropomorphism (2019, background): “A popular theory, the Uncanny Valley Theory (Belk, 2016; Broadbent, 2017; Mori, 1970; Mori et al., 2012) suggests that a robot ’ s degree of human likeness relates to feeling comfortable with the robot.”